Disaster!
by atyler4474
Summary: The Curtis brothers and the Matthews face a flood.


The roar of thunder detonated like a bomb, jolting the 3 brothers out of their soft sound sleep.

Blazing silver flashes lit up the night sky.

"What the?" reacted Darry.

Over on the opposite side of the house, Soda gasped and Ponyboy sat up dazed, rubbing his eyes.

They could hear Darry rummaging around, then finally appearing with a flashlight.

"You two okay?" he asked, concerned.

"Yeah," Soda stated while Ponyboy looked at the clock and read it was 12:30 a.m.

"We've been having an onslaught of rain, but this sounds unusually bad, so I'm going to check for weather advisories on the television," Darry informed Soda and Ponyboy.

He half staggered into the living room and his brothers followed.

Sure enough, there were already alerts telling everybody to stay in their homes for at least the next 12 hours.

Suddenly, without warning, the brothers felt a strange substance under their feet.

Darry shone his flashlight towards the front door.

"The water's coming into our house!" He shouted.

Scrambling, the threesome dashed about grabbing furniture and photos and shoving them up high.

Discarding drenched rugs and rug mats, they looked in horror at the water rushing like a river across their porch.

All at once, they could see Two-Bit using a piece of wood to row a faded old plastic raft with his mother and sister inside.

"How can we help y'all?" He called out.

"We've gone through belongings and tossed things out, now we're about to mop the floors but the wood on the floors is already warping!" Darry shouted back.

"We've tackled the water at our place and put up our possessions as soon as the storm hit earlier this morning. We'll come over and help you mop!"

"Thank you!"

All the morning, as the water gradually receded but left behind a humongous mess in its wake, Two-Bit, his mom and the three brothers mopped, while Kate (Two-Bit's sister, aged 9 1/2), helped clean the edges and muddy corners with a rag.

At last in exhaustion, they collapsed on coaches and in armchairs, as the water had not come up high enough to drench the seats.

Yet, there were nonetheless ridges and valleys in the wooden floors.

"We can't stay here, you know," Darry stated wearily.

"Our home got water in it too," stated Two-Bit as he and his mom and sister hugged the three brothers.

They were all too fatigued to do much more but return to their beds and sleep soon afterward, even the by them more mature but still very active 20-year-old Soda and the vivacious energetic tomboy little Kate.

The next day, however, they were looking for apartments, ruling out ones that did not have pools to cool off in (clean water) in the hot summer days to come.

Darry, carefully looking at expenses and the stash they (him in particular) had saved, found they had just enough money to move into a 2nd floor apartment in a borderline middle class neighborhood with a small pool in walking distance of a public park with nature trails, as Darry knew how much Soda and Ponyboy (especially Ponyboy) loved nature.

However, it put an end to the last of the gang members and relatives being on the same block as one another, for Mr. and Mrs. Cade had long since been jailed, Mr. Randle had been in an alcohol rehab facility for many months, while 20-year old Steve Randle, after having recently moved out of a drug rehab, moved into another 2nd floor apartment in another complex.

Everyone involved was only too obviously shaken from the stress, especially Darry, who had not only borne the brunt of the responsibility of house selling and apartment searching, had never even been allowed to work out his own grief in the double tragedy of Mr. and Mrs. Curtis' death years earlier. He had been too pre-occupied with raising his brothers. Consequently, he developed a cause of shingles, for which he was eventually treated (see more on this in my Death, Disease and Deliverance story)

Luckily, Steve's new apartment was 3 streets down from the Curtis' new dwelling, and one floor down from the Matthews' new residence.

Also, Ponyboy, though not scheduled to turn 18 until the following early September, could still graduate from the same high school within a month's time from the afore-mentioned devastation.


End file.
